


I built this wall

by BiblioMatsuri



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Headcanon, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Jane has a very nasty temper in any universe, Minor Character Death, POV Third Person Limited, Self-Harm, major character death insofar as anyone stays dead in homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 07:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4470551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiblioMatsuri/pseuds/BiblioMatsuri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>so I may see it torn down. // A biography of Nanna Egbert. She wears white, and she tells jokes, and she won't quit for the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I built this wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LostOzian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostOzian/gifts).



Jane was nothing but trouble from the moment she was born. At least, that's what her mother likes to say – horrid silly little brat, so clever and such a sweet little darling, now if only she could stop making a fool of herself. 

Jane Crocker starts learning to bake as soon as she can walk and talk and hold a spoon. By the time she's six years old, she can make cookies a man would sell his mother for, from scratch.

The witch is still better, older and stronger and far more skilled. (Jane will win. It may well kill her, but she will beat the witch.)

Jane is thirteen. 

Jake is also thirteen, and continues offending their so-called mother with impunity. Dash it all. Her brother is a twit, and he will get them both unceremoniously killed if he doesn't learn to play nice.

Jane is short and round and modestly dressed, nothing like the Baroness' form-fitting wonders of tailoring. She wears white, simple clothes. Frocks and smocks and pockets. 

She is not actually an old woman, whatever her beetle-brained brother has to say about it. There's nothing wrong with frocks and smocks and dozens of little pockets, itching powder and baking powder and little bottles of strong alcohol to clean out a wound. 

Jake is forever getting into scrapes, forever coming to her with long furrows scraped out of his arms from turning his face aside. It's a good thing they need glasses, or he might be down an eye. Scars aren't nearly as glamorous as he thinks they are.

Jakey of course gets a proper little bee in his bonnet. He takes his dog, and he takes his gun, and (when prompted) he takes enough bullets to last a few months. He goes off to shoot things and win prizes and be so very manly. It's the first big fight they've ever had, and it ends with Jake in Africa. Jane can't cry, so she laughs until her sides hurt. 

(She is so, so afraid that one day he will stop sending letters home. They're all opened before she gets them, of course, with the words bled out by salt water. Every time an accident, of course. Of course.)

That's not her problem. Little Janey's been left at home, with an evil baroness to stymie and a whole snarl of problems to sort out before Jake gets back. Hansel's off to wander the woods, so Gretel must stay with the witch.

Jane is sixteen. She perches in a delicate chair at a silly social function, desperately smiling and nodding and praying that these deadly dull young men will go find some other society belle to bother. The table's edge is splintering under her hands.

The Baroness is always watching.

Slowly, slowly, Jane pulls her nails out of the red-painted wood and smooths out her fingers from their fists. She smiles, wide and bright and genuine as an heirloom carving knife, and the young men leave. All but one, tall and thin and slightly nervous in the way that all good people are nervous around the cream of high society.

She gives him her name on a napkin, and the address of her third-favorite coffee shop. Can't be seen frequenting the same place too often – that would be favoritism, and the Crocker Heiress must favor none but her mother.

(Everyone knows little girls can't help themselves. Everyone knows the princess cannot save herself, not until the witch is dead.)

Later, she will dig out the little box full of bandages and tinctures and ointments. She will wash away the blood, and she will be fine the next morning, and she will put on a great big smile and go on as she always has. 

(Jane would dearly like to find this 'everyone' and give them a good stern talking-to.)

Until then, she allows herself the luxury of simple pain.

Jane is twenty-two and unmarried, an old maid. She's got a line of suitors beating down her door, all for a chance at the little princess of the Crocker family and their ill-gotten money. The treasure Jake sends back to her still has stains on it, blood and worse. Pillage and plunder. 

Sometimes, in the quiet and privacy of her own mind-

(Or at least, she dearly hopes it's private.) 

(She rather suspects it isn't, and keeps her thoughts buried under recipes and japery. Nothing is better than getting one over the witch.)

Jane is furious Jake for dashing off to have adventures and leaving her with the bill. She certainly doesn't wish he'd stayed, of course not! She's known Jake all her life. The thought of marrying her brother is rather ridiculous and frankly faintly nauseating. 

Perhaps in another world, though. Perhaps if they hadn't met as babies and grown up together, Jane leaving floury handprints all over his favorite hat and Jake getting mud on her nice dresses, she might have fallen for him. He's just the sort of daring rogue she likes in the movies – but daring isn't wise. and rogues, as everyone knows, are hideously unreliable. 

Though there's a part of her that wants to laugh and laugh and laugh at that. Who could be more reliable than a known scoundrel, someone who wants and needs and takes without lies, without the masque of polite society to cover up the teeth in their smile? Jane's always wanted to learn how to set traps. Oh, but that isn't ladylike, so she can't. Oh, well.

(That old witch is wrong about one thing. She and Jake were never meant to marry.)

Jane is twenty-six and THE WITCH IS DEAD, HOO HOO! Er. Ahem, that is, the Baroness has mysteriously disappeared and left the family fortune to Jakey-dear. Oh, no, whatever will poor little Janey do?

Poor little Janey is going to take her savings and open the best little joke shop on Earth, that's what. She's got a good head for numbers and a better head for business, and if there was one good thing about being the Crocker Heiress, it was learning how to win even when she's lost utterly. No one said it had to be her victory.

Jane Egbert is thirty-two and happily married. She's always wanted a real, true, proper family. And best of all, her husband is dear and precious and such an utter nobody that his greatest worry is getting to work on time. They go on day trips and picnics and to see the moving pictures. She laughs at Dorothy, at the witch dead of washing-up water. If only it were so simple. (She prefers Hansel and Gretel. Baking in her own oven would serve her right.)

Everything is so peaceful all of a sudden. How lovely!

Not that she's bored, of course. She's got the shop and her husband and a customer base that spreads all across the country and beyond, folks mailing in to have her handmade joke items delivered to such exotic locales as Austin and Rainbow Falls and the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 

(She knows that last one is Jake. What on Earth is he up to now? ...oh. Oh, Jakey, that is a terrible plan.)

Jane is forty. Her husband is calm and reliable and solid as rocks, and their little boy is going to be just like him in a few years, she can tell. Her baby boy is a precious pain in the patootie, and she can't wait until he starts sleeping through the night. 

Jane is forty-one. Her husband will not be coming home. Her son is too young to be without a father, but that's not going to make her love any less dead. 

She can take a hint.

(There's always another war, though. Jane has always fought her battles with measuring cups and mixing spoons, with wit and cleverness and a nose for all things suspicious. She will not let this be her end.)

Jane is forty-one years and thirteen days old when she and her son move to a quiet little suburb in Washington. It isn't quite far enough, not with the company's plans for expansion, but it's where they need to be. (And the world will end before that factory ever gets built.)

Blast her brother's incomprehensible letters. The signs don't lie. 

Jane is fifty years old, at the turn of her century. Her son is coming home with scraped knees and blacked eyes, her temper and her strength and not a bit of her hard-learned care. She does her best.

Jane is sixty-two. She has a not-quite-so-young son who's grown into quite the dapper gentleman, kind and courteous and solid as a rock. He'll make a good father someday.

Goodness. She'll be a grandmother soon enough. Shame she'll never meet the boy in this lifetime, but if he's anything like her, then he'll be made of stern enough stuff to stand the Baroness' wrath at least. And she knows, deep in her backbrain where echoes of lives never lived echo through her, that he will need to.

Jane is seventy-nine and she is tired. Not so tired that she can't mind the shop, but it's good that her son has his own income. She's just glad he grew up sensible. Someone in their family had to be, hoo hoo!

Jane is precisely eighty-six years old when a great huge rock falls on her head. She dies instantly, crushed and fried and pulverized into ashes.

Jane Egbert has been dead for a day when her son goes to gather the ashes, painstakingly separating them out from the rubble of her beloved joke shop. How he knows the difference, he can't explain, but he knows it's important. 

He takes the baby with him. They'll never be separated for more than a day until the boy is thirteen, and he will grow up with tales of his Nanna and her portrait over the mantelpiece. It's not quite family tradition, but the spirit is there.

Nannasprite has existed for all of a minute, and already she's had to rescue her silly grandson from shale imps. He's a silly and gullible and wonderful boy.

He has Jakey's smile, bright and worryingly innocent. But there's her swinging arm, and her Prankster's Gambit, and the twinkle in her eyes made over new.

She sees him rage, as aimless and explosion-loud as Jake in a temper. She sees him fear, quiet and keeping back for fear of failure, and sees her childhood repeating itself. She sees him laugh, time and time again as the world falls to pieces around him, and loves him fiercely for it. Laughter can be a bitter medicine, but it's certainly the best one.

Nannasprite throws a joke book into the past. She has all the cheat codes, the make-this-happen godmode tricks her boy won't have for years yet, and she's going to use them.

No one will ever know it was her. Nannasprite finds she's fine with that. And if she isn't, well, it's not as though anyone else will ever know.

She wonders when she got old.

Most likely when she died, of course. Hoo hoo hoo!

Nannasprite has existed for just over four days, and what a busy four days they have been, when she meets her... great-niece, other grandchild, other child? 

Jade is all of these and herself besides, a sparkling shining presence that smells of gun oil and hunting dog and the breaking of atoms. She was Jakey's first and foremost and always, and oh, this girl is brilliant! She is the best of them and the worst of them just as much as John is, and she is oh so utterly precious. Not quite as easy to spook, though. Pity.

Nannasprite has known eighty-six years and a few months (She's not quite sure how long. Time's never been her strong point.) when her boy's planet goes kablooey. It's almost as loud as the sound of Jade's tears. 

She stands it, of course. The girl will have to journey on alone, and that'll be hard enough without a dead woman's grief to add to it.

Nannasprite waits. She waits, and acts; as needed and only ever as needed, because she is a sprite and she is a guide, and the Game is for the living. That's not to say she can't interfere, of course, just that her methods have to be a bit different than they were in life. She can't just go out and pick fights and expect to win, not against anything but another game construct. It's not her place, now, no matter how much that grates against a little part of her that will never be anything but a fighter. 

She helps. Not in any direct, useful way. Of course not! She's a fairy guide, not a hero. She fights in other ways. In small ways, jokes and japes and trickery. Magic is all misdirection, once you strip away the fancy talk. 

Now Nannasprite is facing herself, and Nannasprite is also facing herself, and Nannasprite is facing her other self, her post-scratch self who is young and cracked and brilliant and not yet wise. Now she is so, so proud she could just scream.

(Fate never pays its debts, but Life balances. The witch will burn, and she will be there to see it.)

This is going to be an utter laugh riot.

Nanna Jane not-a-Crocker Egbert is the giddy queen of jokers, and will remain so until she is wiped from existence.

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for Request 4. I couldn't decide what part of her life to focus on, so I started sketching out her canon backstory and Nanna's story just grew from there. I hope this is okay.


End file.
